Will Double-Parked Truck Driver Be charged for Causing Fatal Moped Crash? Cops Won’t Say

A fatal crash in Brooklyn caused by a double-parked delivery truck may not have even resulted in a simple ticket for the truck driver.

Cops say that on Thursday morning at about 4:10 a.m., 20-year-old Luis Ramos-Cumez was headed north on 86th Street on an electric motor scooter when he collided with the back of a delivery truck parked near a restaurant in Gravesend. Ramos-Cumez, a Bensonhurst resident, died at the scene of the crash, while his unidentified passenger on the back of the moped was taken to NYU Langone in serious but stable condition. Police had originally identified the vehicle Ramos-Cumez drove as both an e-bike and an electric scooter, but a department spokesperson later clarified that the vehicle was a Moto TTX moped.

The spokesperson also said that the parked and unoccupied delivery truck was actually double-parked at the time of the crash, but would not say whether the driver was at least ticketed for the dangerous and possibly illegal parking that led to a man’s death. Officers from the 61st Precinct, where the crash took place, could not be reached for comment.

The stretch of 86th Street where the crash took place is in front of both L & B Spumoni Gardens and The Lights of Baku and is a notorious place for double-parked trucks, to the point where Google Street View’s roaming car nabbed one such truck on a trip up the block in 2011.

Ramos-Cumez, the fourth New Yorker to die while driving a moped or other electric motorized vehicle, is only the latest road death in New York City in 2022, a year when Vision Zero has accelerated its backslide. Traffic deaths, which dropped to a record-low 230 in 2018, rose to 244 in 2019, then 243 in 2020 (a year where New Yorkers traveled less due to coronavirus lockdowns) and then 262 in 2021. With 63 road deaths so far in 2022, the city’s traffic chaos has continued, with deaths on the road rising even faster than last year’s bloody 2021.